


I Hear you Calling in the Dead of Night

by anabundanceofpuns



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Nightmares, POV Third Person, Post-Reichenbach, Suicidal Thoughts, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 05:55:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3558620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anabundanceofpuns/pseuds/anabundanceofpuns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John decides he has finally worked up enough courage to tell Sherlock that he is in love with him. However, something seems a little off about Sherlock today...</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Hear you Calling in the Dead of Night

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from "Overjoyed" by Bastille. 
> 
> This is my very first fanfiction! The idea came to me last night and I just went with it. It's not beta'd or britpicked so I apologize for any errors. I hope you all like it :)

Some people say that when you love somebody, it is best to tell that somebody, even if you suspect your love is unrequited. Unrequited love is exactly what John was afraid of. He might even say that it was one of his worst fears (along with spiders and being buried alive), but he still felt the need to say what was on his mind. It had been eating away at him for too long, always sitting at the back of his consciousness. With that final thought, John arose from his bed and began his trek downstairs to spend another agonizing day with the object of his fixation. 

Sherlock was sitting in his armchair, typing something on his laptop, right where John expected him to be. At the thought of this, John felt a bit of uneasiness, like something was amiss. He brushed the thought aside and put the kettle on to boil.

"Tea?" John asked, already assuming that the answer would be a yes and grabbing two cups and two teabags from the cupboard. John received a noncommittal grunt in reply, so he waited for the water to boil and when it did, made the tea and ventured into the sitting room, handing Sherlock his tea and moving to his chair with his. 

Sherlock and John both sipped at their tea, Sherlock continuing to type on his laptop. John still felt that uneasy feeling at the back of his mind. He stopped for a moment to consider that maybe it was the same thought that had been pestering him for the past several years, ever since that gorgeous consulting detective had winked at him in the lab at St. Bart's. He wasn't sure, however, when would be the best time to bring that up. He knew it needed to happen soon, though. John wasn't sure how much longer he could stand Sherlock eye-fucking him at all hours of the day and still attempt to keep his sanity. His love for his flatmate was prominent, but also nearly as prominent was his fear. What if Sherlock didn't return his feelings? Would their friendship ever go back to being what it was? Most terrifying of all, would Sherlock be so disgusted by John's feelings towards him that he would expect John to move out? 

John had become so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he didn't notice that Sherlock had stopped typing and started gazing at him with his stunning green-grey eyes. Sherlock cleared his throat and John looked up, startled. Sherlock began, "There is something I think we should talk about." John was suddenly terrified, entwined by the sheer enormity of things that Sherlock's sentence could have implied. "Oh God," John thought, "what if he knows? What if he knows that I'm in love with him? I wasn't ready to tell him just quite yet and oh, fuck it." 

John left the safety and comfort of his mind and gazed back at Sherlock. "I'm not quite sure how to tell you this, Sherlock, but I need to get this off my chest. I can't stand it any longer. Sherlock, I'm in love with you. I have been since the day we met and since then it has been bothering me day and night. I understand if you don't feel the same, but I hope we could still be friends." 

Sherlock looked back at John, holding his gaze as he began to speak. There was an eerie, ghostlike presence in his eyes. "John, there's something I need to say too, I've needed to say it for a while, in fact." 

John waited, hoping with all the hope he could muster that the next words out of Sherlock's mouth would be the ones that he had been waiting to hear for what had seemed like several thousand years. That uneasy feeling came back for a third time, now stronger than ever, sending off alarm bells in John's head, pounding at his temples like a thousand migraines all at once. A wave of dread rushed over him that nearly caused him to black out. Suddenly, the scene before his eyes shifted. John was no longer in the sitting room at 221B Baker Street. He was standing in the street in front of St. Bart's, staring up at the rooftop, mobile pressed to his ear. On that rooftop stood Sherlock, looking down on John like standing on that ledge was causing him actual physical pain. John stood and waited, frozen with fear at the thought of what was to come. With that, Sherlock spoke.

"This phone call, it's...it's my note. That's what people do, don't they? Leave a note?" John felt Sherlock's name leave his lips without having made a conscious effort to do so. Before John could get another word in, Sherlock was falling like an angel tumbling from the heavens. 

Just as Sherlock's body hit the pavement, John's body shot up from his bed. John sat there, sweat dripping down his body and his shoulders heaving with the power of his sobs. John slowly sank back down onto his pillow, tears representing everything that had happened and everything he never said falling down from his eyes, over his cheeks, and finally off of his chin onto the pillow. He had the same recurring nightmare nearly every night, only made more vivid by the sleeping medication that had never worked in the first place. John hadn't been taking it for a while now, saving it, because why take it if it doesn't work? John knew it did work for one thing, however. He had been contemplating it for a while now. As the sobs wracked his body worse than they ever had before, John thought that now was as good a time as any. John climbed out of bed slowly, his extremities not wanting to move like they thought they knew exactly what fate awaited them. 

John went to the bathroom and returned with a glass of water and the nearly full bottle of pills. John took a deep breath, overcome with the thought of what he was about to do. He whispered his last words. "If you can't be here with me, then I'll just have to come to you." John unscrewed the top of the bottle and dumped out ten pills into his shaking hand. John couldn't feel his body shaking or the tears continuing to fall down his cheeks. At that moment, the only thing he felt was grief and pain, pain he could feel deeper in his body that any emotion he had ever felt before. As he was in the process of putting the handful of pills in his mouth, he heard a noise. It was the unmistakable sound of the door to his flat being opened. John carefully put the pills down for now. He wanted his reunion with the one he loved to be uninterrupted. John grabbed his gun from the drawer of his bedside table and proceeded to move down the hallway and into the sitting room. He was greeted by the sight of a tall, extremely skinny man with shoulder length hair whose face he could not make out due to the darkness. A voice, slightly scratchy but still unmistakable after all this time, called out one word, a word which said by the right person could bring John to his knees.

"John," Sherlock said. John fell, new tears replacing the lines the recent ones had made on his face. The gun fell from his loosened grip, just as Sherlock fell to John's side, just as Sherlock had fallen from that rooftop that awful day. A strip of moonlight from a nearby window illuminated Sherlock's face. John could tell that he had literally walked through hell. Sherlock's eyes were sunken and his cheekbones protruded more than they ever had before; it wasn't hard to see that Sherlock had lost a lot of weight. His unruly hair had grown nearly six inches and he had a large amount of stubble spread across the pale skin of his face.

"John," Sherlock repeated. "I'm here." Sherlock pulled John into his arms as John continued to sob, then pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead. "I'm here." John noticed that Sherlock's body was shaking just as much as his own. Sherlock's head rested on John and he felt the slow drip of tears on his shoulder. Somehow, in the back of his mind, John knew that this was not a dream. He felt that fate had just given him a chance to say the words he should have said a long time ago.

"I love you, Sherlock," John breathed. As those four words fought their escape from his mouth, John felt an enormous weight being lifted from him, like he was finally being freed from a cage he had never known he had been trapped in.

Sherlock's shaky voice replied, "I love you too, John."

"Promise you'll never leave me again," John whispered hoarsely, "promise you'll stay."

"Forever, John. Forever and always."


End file.
